


Assault and the Kiss: Outtakes

by byzantienne, fadeverb



Series: Leo [32]
Category: In Nomine
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-11
Updated: 2014-01-30
Packaged: 2018-01-08 07:29:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1129960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/byzantienne/pseuds/byzantienne, https://archiveofourown.org/users/fadeverb/pseuds/fadeverb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maddy and Vivienne and Leo and Zhune do exciting things! Which sometimes do not fit into the main storyline.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In Which Clothing Is Acquired

**Author's Note:**

> This is a collection of outtakes from _The Happy Hour of Assault and the Kiss_ , covering various scenes that are wrong for the pacing, not quite canonical, inconsistent in tone, or otherwise inappropriate for going in the main story. We'll make a note if it Really Didn't Happen.
> 
> None of this is likely to make much sense unless you're reading the main story.

The only reason we have not been thrown out of this store yet is that Zhune attuned to the floor manager, and there’s still a chance that the argument we’re having will break through the deep respect and adoration she’s acquired for my partner.

“It’s jeans and a fucking shirt,” Zhune says, his voice steady and low and incredibly reasonable, like there aren’t fingernail marks in the door of the changing room he just closed behind us. “Pre-distressed jeans, Leah, this is the sort of thing you wear on your own when you pick out your own clothing.”

“I am not going into any meeting, with the _Game_ of all people, wearing clothing from the fucking Gap.”

“What, you want Hot Topic?” Zhune’s speaking in an incredibly pleasant tone, which is one of the ways I know he’s furious. “Because the mall is closing in ten minutes, and that’s the only other store we can reach before then.”

“You’re not the one trying to pull on these jeans, which are not--”

“They sell skirts at Hot Topic,” Zhune says. “These cute little swirly ones. Pleated. And tights.”

We stare at each other for a while. The floor manager makes loud conversation with her clerks, to keep them away from the changing rooms.

“I am going to freeze in this, Zhune.”

“So stay in the car until we reach the bar.” He tugs the idiotic shirt I’m wearing (it doesn’t even have sleeves that reach my wrists) into a neater position on me. “We’ll pick up new shoes on the way out.”

“I notice _you’re_ not wearing anything from this store.”

My partner slides an arm around my shoulder, and pulls me in close. I’d probably jerk away on principle if I didn’t need the damn body heat. “Don’t be ridiculous. We need time yet to help me change. No one in this city has any sense of style, and it’s impolitic to show them the error of their ways when we have work to do.”


	2. In Which We Have A Friendly Chat

Upon further consideration, maybe running off to the hotel bar with a Gamester wasn’t the best way to deal with my partner dragging me into card games and playing stupid games with. You know. The Gamesters. It’s not so much out of the frying pan and into the fire as it is one of those really terrible movie sequences where people run away from rolling doom in a straight line instead of just dodging to the side.

Tonight’s unwise choice: discussing law-breaking with the far too attractive Balseraph of the Game.

"Breaking the law is my job." This is something even she can’t argue with. I’m with Theft, it’s in the name, and me not breaking the law would be like Servitors of Death taking up work in a soup kitchen. Without poisoning everyone. “And doing my job is always very important, so there we go.” I flick my hand with a little dramatic flair. Q.E.D.

"You shouldn't worry," says the Balseraph. "We want to do our job just as much. Maybe more! Everything will be fine as long as everyone remembers that.” Her smile is sweet and all the more terrifying because of it. The exact sort of thing that should have me remembering an appointment or something I needed to check in with my partner about, but why would I want to do that?

And instead she’s reminding me of Regan. The way her mouth moves, the way she _sits_. If I had an excuse for us to go walking somewhere, I might suggest it just to watch her walk the way a Balseraph does.

“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” I say. Oo, that came out a little nearer to sarcastic than I quite meant. I’m not sure the Game takes backtalk as well as my girlfriend did, and she tended to respond with violence. So far, no violence, and I don’t expect that to come up until we’ve done more of their job for them, but as long as I have a chance to ask a few questions... “What’s the most important part of your job?”

"This job, or every job?" she shoots back, so fast that I suspect I’m not going to get a straight answer at all.

Maybe I don’t want a straight answer. But Zhune has told me, often enough that I’m inclined to believe him, that what people lie about, or avoid answering questions on, tells you as much as what they give the truth on. It’s certainly true for me. (To the point that I end up second-guessing myself. Never mind that.) “Both,” I say, which is cheating, but gives me a better chance at seeing which one she’ll dodge away from. Or give a blithe, plausible answer about. “Especially if they’re not the same thing.” Let’s skip the party line answer. It’s boring.

She thinks about this for long enough that I’m at least not getting the straight party line. "This job? Not getting caught.” Interesting. It’s a good standard goal, and one I’m very fond of myself, but not what I would’ve thought a Gamester would pick. “Every job? Fixing broken things and broken people and making them right again. No matter what you have to do to get there."

Maddy always sounds sincere. (She told me to call her that, not Madeline, which makes me wonder if what her partner calls her is a name reserved for people she likes better, or...more like Zhune calling me Leah. Probably the former.) There’s a faint chance that she’s telling the truth, if only because that sounds like the way the Game might describe its actions. Sort of like how Julie and Lanthano describe Theft as the process of deciding what you want and then finding a way to get it.

This is quite likely the worst possible conversation for me to have with this Balseraph. The chances of saying something wildly unwise are higher than I like, compared to discussing, I don’t know, the weather. It’s hard to say something actionable in court about the weather. (Probably.) But they do need us for this job, and if Zhune didn’t think this was safe, he wouldn’t let me walk off with a Gamester on my own, right? Right. And he’s the one who knows how this works.

I lean in, chin on my hands. A pose that works on humans, not demons, but it couldn’t hurt, and it’s not like it matters what she thinks of me anyway. We’re just having a conversation. “How do you figure out what’s broken?"

"Sometimes you just know," Maddy says, "but most of the time you take everything you know to be allowed and everything you know to be necessary and then remember that nothing is fair but everything's explainable, and it's pretty straightforward after that.” She blinks at me over that smile. “You're a Thief. Why do you want to know?"

I end up drinking my beer as a cover, and not a subtle one at all, for thinking this through. _Nothing is fair_ I knew already, but _everything’s explainable_ is a new one to me. And I want to follow up on that, I would like to know what she means by _explainable_ , especially attached to...everything. Because in my experience there are a lot of things in life that attach to _nothing_ , and not much that’s universally true. Just things that seem very, very true for a little while if you ask the right person, who can make you believe it.

Seraphim and Balseraphs are both good at making something sound true for a while. Last longer with the former, but it feels more true with the latter.

Never mind that. She asked a question, and if she wanted questions back, she would have left space for them.

"Because what’s considered broken--the rules are obscure and obscured, which implies that the _purpose_ isn’t to allow the greatest possible number of people to be in compliance, but to force the greatest possible number of people to reach a broken state.” I’m working this out as I say it, and I have the terrible feeling that these are things I should not be saying out loud in this company. That it’s the truth is never a valid defense. “But if the most important part of the job is to identify and _fix_ what’s broken, then of course it makes sense that the whole system is designed to provide as much breakage as possible.” That’s Hell all over, gremlins to Princes, damned and damning. We’ve had millennia to work out not just how to be terrible people, but how to industrialize and streamline the process. Like Regan used to say, looking at a field of the damned in Gehenna lining up just so that we could practice destroying attacking enemies: “It’s a target-rich environment."

There is a fascinating expression on Maddy’s face that I cannot interpret. Her own train of thought, I suppose. "The system isn't broken, Leo," she says. (At least she uses the right name for me. I don’t even care if it’s a power play.) "People are broken. People are demons, mostly, and demons are terribly selfish and cruel and unpleasant, like we're supposed to be, and the Rules--the thing you call the system--they account for that. Which is why it looks like the system promotes breakage, to you. You're too far outside."

"Too far outside, or too far inside." She’s in the system and it makes sense to her. But I’m not outside of it, no matter what she thinks. The system isn’t the Game, the system is _Hell_ , or maybe the nature of being a demon. People are broken, and people are demons, and demons are selfish _like we’re supposed to be_ , and there is this gap between the two points that I don’t know how to articulate. Some sort of fundamental problem of _broken_ and _supposed to be_ occupying the same space. Like building an artificial ruin to make the garden more picturesque, except it’s the universe playing with people instead of marble and limestone. It’s not about inside or outside, or it’s about both at the same time. "I’m never sure if it’s fish and bicycles or fish and water. All of the really nuanced analysis techniques for 'selfish' and so forth are human-designed, and that makes them inherently flawed for application to what’s natural in demons. Though I’m not sure there’s any escaping that influence entirely, with how Words work."

"Not to sound all Technologist about it," Maddy says, "but it's a giant feedback loop, or at least I've always thought so; we're selfish because we're made of Words and humans drive Words to make us more selfish and then we meet out appropriate punishment to those humans.” Though I’m pretty sure eternal fire isn’t appropriate by any sort of reasonable standard. “Nothing's fair and everything's explicable. That can be rule one, if you like."

I would almost like it to be. No doubt she could give me as much pure and satisfying certainty as Regan ever could. (More than Penny could. Penny admits his own fallibility.) But I know a warning sign when I hear it. When a Gamester talks about rules, it’s time to hear capital letters and change the topic.

There is curious, and then there is stupid, and I would rather no one in this job take me for the latter. Zhune can get me out of a lot of trouble, but--not the kind that I sign up for. And if I were human, this would be the part where the contract was lying on the table in front of me with a pen held out for me to take.

Never took that offer from anyone else, either, unless it was a Prince telling me to sign at the dotted line, and I am not _such_ a sucker for Balseraphs that I will here. Not quite.

"Maybe it’s a better conversation for when we don’t have so much work to do," I say, blithe now since she never took the chance to be. Work is always a valid reason to change the line of conversation. "We should figure out how we want to make this work.”

We can come back to this topic another time. Maybe. Better circumstances, or... I don’t know. Probably it won’t come up again. We _do_ have a job to do.


End file.
